Our God is a God of surprises. I mean real surprises – not just something that pops up out of what’s already there, like a jack-in-the-box, but something that comes out of nowhere. And that we couldn’t have thought up ourselves.
We can see it in the reading today about King Solomon and his desire for wisdom. As we know, Solomon’s father, David, while a great man, was not always a well-behaved man. He messed up with Bathsheba and Uriah. But out of the mess, God was able to still make something good, and it’s what we heard about today: their son Solomon’s desire for wisdom above all else. God transformed plain old human screwing-up into goodness.
Of course, Solomon will mess things up, too. He’s so oppressive and tyrannical that when he dies, half the kingdom secedes, says, “We’re outta here.” That comes later on, but it’s there. Goofing up seems to be the story of humanity. But fortunately it seems to be the story of God that God finds a way to make a new kind of rightness – maybe not the old kind of rightness, but a surprising one – out of it all.
Which is all well and good, until we stumble into today’s Gospel passage. And then the whole “surprises” thing becomes almost too hot to handle.
For a lot of the summer, our Gospel readings have been from Mark, which means they’ve been very concrete – that’s the nature of the Gospel of Mark. Stormy seas, rocking boats, people who are sick, people who are upset. It might seem a little distant, but at least it probably all sounds like something we can relate to.
But then suddenly, from those more tangible stories, we get drop-kicked into this bottomless pool of ideas in the Gospel of John for a few weeks now that are anything but concrete. They’re strange, mysterious, and – truth be told – maybe even a little bit frightening.
It’s the Gospel of John at its most Gospel of John. Just Jesus talking, but it’s not parables or beatitudes. Last week Jesus got into this kind of space by saying he was the living bread – which is a bit confusing, but still, we can relate to the idea of bread that nourishes us, we can get behind that. But here, he ups the ante: it’s no longer just bread we’re eating, it’s his flesh. And we’re drinking his blood. And this strange food doesn’t just let us live, the way regular bread would – it lets us live … forever, whatever that means.
Ok, let’s stop right there. Because, let’s face it, we’ve come nose-to-nose with some of the most powerful and potentially upsetting language in all of Scripture. Right here.
We’re used to hearing about Jesus’ flesh and blood, but let’s climb back into the ears of those who would have heard Jesus himself say this. They would have been used to the idea of sacrificial animals – both in Judaism at the time and in other cultures at the time. But the idea of eating human flesh and drinking blood – human or animal – was appalling and deeply upsetting to long-held traditions of the Torah. Combine it with the idea that that person is saying he’s part of God, and we’ve got a train wreck of everything that, at the time, seemed to be both totally right and totally wrong.
In other words, we have a surprise. And this is what I’m talking about – a real, total surprise. Not just a new-and-improved version of whatever people had expected before – because that would have been easy enough to swallow. Sort of, “Of course, I’ll update to the new version of Internet Explorer.” This is completely new software, and it’s just not working on anybody’s computer.
We’ve got a Messiah – whom many people were looking for at the time. But it’s not a Messiah who’s living an ascetic life out in the desert, which some people expected, rising above the flesh, saying the spirit is superior to the flesh. And neither is it a Messiah who descends from the clouds, god-like and way above merely human messiness.
No, what we’ve got is a Messiah who is human, and in fact, he says the way to true life – not the good life, but true life – is through that very humanness. That very humanness.
And that just runs counter to anything anyone had ever thought about God or worship – this flesh and blood stuff has to do with worship, right. Because, let’s face it, while being human can have its shining moments, it can also be the pits. Or it can just be some vague place in between, where we feel the pushes and pulls of daily life, with no crisis but just weariness and discontent. And all of it’s laced with losses, temptations, and struggles. And then, as Woody Allen would say, it’s all over far too quickly.
But, in fact, Jesus is saying, that’s right where God has landed. In the cells and organs and tissues of a body. Not above the struggles and losses and temptations, but in them, some of which we know about from the Bible, and some of which we’ll never know. Remember the shortest verse in the entire New Testament – “Jesus wept”? He didn’t weep as a sideshow for us, he wept because grief, pain, and regret welled up in him like a wave, and as it crashed over him, it came out as broken sobs.
Which most of us can relate to. And from that point of view, we get the whole thing about Jesus being human. But then that dumps us out at a pretty important question: if his humanity is so much like ours – then how can it be so different at the same time? How does something human give us life beyond the human, as he says it will?
Well, let’s go back to exactly what he does say. He talks about eating and drinking that gives us more than just existence. And it’s pretty intense, but it’s not totally new. Throughout Scripture, God urges us to eat and drink God’s offerings – not just the food that lets out bodies live, but God’s salvation that lets our very beings live. You can find it in the Hebrew Scriptures, especially in Isaiah, and here it is again – but in a radical, new way.
It’s not God saying, Partake of my salvation, which is more what we’d hear in Isaiah. This is a sweaty sunburnt guy saying, Partake of me. And – partake of me because I am part of God. And that will bring you into that closer relationship with God.
And that’s a whole new thing. Jesus and God are very close, in a way that’s really a mystery. But the closeness doesn’t stop there. When we take Jesus into our lives – however that happens – we become part of that rich order of life, too. Not in a way that I can package up and explain to you – I can’t – but in a way that Jesus invites us to find out about by living into it.
Which is his whole point in this dense passage. The images may be hard to get our heads around, but … one bottom line is clear: the only way to start to understand what it’s about is to live into it. We take Jesus’ life into the center of our own human, fleshy lives. It’s not clothing we put on, it’s not a hat or a tattoo. It’s something that somehow goes into all the parts of our selves – our bodies and our souls without making a big distinction between the two. And Jesus sort of flows through all those parts, the ones we show to the world and feel proud of, and the ones that are shadowy, the ones we might even be afraid of.
And by being present to us in all those places – even the harder ones, the ones we think are too broken to fix, the ones we think cannot change – Jesus brings life that is new and surprising into all those places, too. The God of surprises.
So let’s let it go! – let it go through the mind of our lives – our thinking. Let it nourish the guts of our lives, our feelings. And let it go through our heartbeat, giving us life from second to second. And that’s a whole new and surprising way to think about what life is.
Not because the idea of God’s nourishment was new – that was there before. And not because it’s an interesting theory. And not really because of the new definition of flesh and blood, though that’s quite a show-stopper.
Maybe the reason this passage is so powerful is that all those more common explanations may be missing the point. Maybe, the point is that this stuff about Jesus’ flesh and blood being part of us is that it’s the most radical and surprising act of love the world has ever seen. Maybe that is the real show-stopper. Trying to let ourselves be loved that much. And for a lot of us, that’s the thing that's the hardest to get our heads around.
The divine reaching across the abyss that seems to separate heaven and earth, the divine reaching right into the core of the flesh and blood that seem like the lowest common denominator of humanity. You can find it in anyone who’s even barely hanging onto the edge of life with their fingernails – this is God reaching into that bottom line, and then saying, "I'm staying here."
In other words, we can’t get from the human to the divine; you can’t get there from here. But God doesn’t let that be the end of the issue. God can get from the divine down to us – and God does, relentlessly. There’s nothing God won’t do to show us that we are loved, in a way that makes us new. And maybe even surprising.
And if we, as nice 21st century Christians, are tempted to put this all into the nice little basket of “oh this is all just about communion,” let’s stop and remember: in the Gospel of John, there is no account of the Last Supper. In John, what we get as Jesus’ last big act before death is foot washing. Washing his disciples’ dirty smelly feet. And telling us to do the same.
And lest it be too easy for us to feel like, “oh, those people way back then, they just couldn’t get with the Jesus thing. Duh!” – let’s bring this around to us. Would we, could we, ever say, “on no, that’s not the way God is supposed to look and act. God looks like this, not that.” Or – “oh no, that’s not the way worship is supposed to look and act. Worship looks like this. And not that.” Surely, we’d never say anything like that….?!
The bottom line here is that, in retelling these words of Jesus, the writer of John isn’t just making a point about how we are to remember Jesus. John is making a point about how we are to find Jesus throughout our lives. John’s pretty cosmic – but that’s the nature of the fourth Gospel. It’s almost like he doesn’t need to tell us about the Last Supper. He’s already told us the end result.
It’s not recycling the old ideas of what was right, of what worship was supposed to be, or of how God should work, way up on high and how a Messiah should look, sitting on a throne.
This whole thing today is a new idea of what’s right, a surprising revelation of what God is really like and how God really works. And the reason we can trust that revelation – as opposed to all the others that may tempt us out there in the world, all the things people want to tell us about God – is that this one is first and last about love. Not force, not manipulation, not coercion, and not human judgment of other humans.
We can trust this revelation about God because it’s simply an invitation into ever-changing love. It never ceases to be love. And it never stays the same.
Living in Jesus – dwelling, as he would say here – means taking him in to every place in our messy human lives and knowing that he wants to go there. Christianity, like its progenitor Judaism, is earthy and in this world – and it believes God is in this world too. But can we dare to let ourselves believe that?
Do we dare to let ourselves believe in the God of surprises? The God who keeps divine fingers in the clay that we mess up, and who then takes that clay and turns it into something wonderful and hands it back to us and says, “I love you, and out of that love, this is for you. It’s brand new,” God says, “and you know what? So are you.”